See also: Doublethink
In George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four, 2 + 2 = 5 appears as a possible statement of Ingsoc (English Socialism). The Party slogan “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength” is a dogma which the Party expects the citizens of Oceania to accept as true. Writing in his secret diary in the year 1984, the protagonist Winston Smith ponders if the Party might declare “two plus two equals five” as fact, as well as whether or not belief in such a consensus reality substantiates the lie.[19] About the falsity of “two plus two equals five”, in the Ministry of Love, the interrogator O’Brien tells the thought criminal Smith that control over physical reality is unimportant to the Party, provided the citizens of Oceania subordinate their real-world perceptions to the political will of the Party; and that, by way of doublethink: “Sometimes, Winston. [Sometimes it is four fingers.] Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once”.[19]
Orwell used the idea of 2 + 2 = 5 in an essay of January 1939 in The Adelphi; “Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell“:[20]
It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.
In propaganda work for the BBC during the Second World War, Orwell applied the illogic of 2 + 2 = 5 to counter the reality-denying psychology of Nazi propaganda, which he addressed in the essay “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (1943):
Nazi theory, indeed, specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science”, “Jewish Science”, etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future, but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened”—well, it never happened. If he says that “two and two are five”—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs—and, after our experiences of the last few years [the Blitz, 1940–41] that is not a frivolous statement.[21]
In addressing Nazi anti-intellectualism, Orwell’s reference might have been Hermann Göring‘s hyperbolic praise of Adolf Hitler: “If the Führer wants it, two and two makes five!”[22] In the political novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, concerning the Party’s philosophy of government for Oceania, Orwell said:
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?[23]
The 1951 British edition of the text, published by Secker & Warburg, erroneously omitted the “5”, thus rendering it simply as “2 + 2 =”. This error, likely the result of a typesetting mistake, remained in all further editions of the text until the 1987 edition, whereafter a correction was made based on Orwell’s original typescript.[24] This misprint did not exist in the American editions of the text, with British students of the text in the meanwhile misinterpreting Orwell’s original intentions.[25]
